


The last thing I need is to end up askew

by Radiolaria



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s07e07 The Bells of Saint John, F/M, Introspection, Not Beta Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 10:05:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/747276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Radiolaria/pseuds/Radiolaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mad monk they call him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The last thing I need is to end up askew

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Isabelle by Gregory and the Hawk

"Cloîtres silencieux, voûtes des monastères,

C’est vous, sombres caveaux, vous qui savez aimer !

Ce sont vos froides nefs, vos pavés et vos pierres,

Que jamais lèvre en feu n’a baisé sans pâmer. "

_Alfred de Musset, Poésies nouvelles ; Rolla_

 

"Ah, monastery walls, and cloisters pure and calm,

Dark, silent caves, 'tis you who know Love's holy balm.

It is your cold, gray stones, your altars and your walls,

On which Love's burning kiss ecstatically falls."

Translation by Kendall Warren

 

 ***

 

It’s a sin. The Doctor realises.

“I miss your skin” and he caressed the canvas, still immaculate, snow-white from lines, waiting to receive his stroke to flesh a face. A new face.

 

 

Mad they called him, because one night he thought he sighted her in the parlour and rocketed through the crowd, yanking aside the brothers to reach her, throwing her name at the air filled with outraged whispers. When he stumbled at the very spot where she had stood a second before, he felt nothing but coldness.

Monk because he devoted himself to the understanding of Clara, the woman twice dead, in his studies as dedicated and thorough as any friar. On the refectory table, he engraved her names, entwining the letters as if he could decipher something of her in their loops even. Clara Oswin Oswald he intoned as in a monotonous chant. What significance in those words, what burning power.

 

 

Sanity convinced himself long ago that once she would be gone, he would have been done with her. His memory is a vast palace, some corner derelict and dark, but the edifice still standing, still high and boundless, with rooms infinite and numberless, where he keeps his friends and foes, his dead and his living, the paths he chose in distant forests, those on which he lost himself, and all the worlds he has ever visited.

And faces.

Stored away.

He would let her go.

For a while he listened to that voice and he believed. No more startling every time he saw curly hair in the distance. No more questions when someone, anyone, would mention a woman. Where there was trouble, he would not be searching the on-looker faces for a pair of sinful green eyes.

How wrong.

(How very wrong.)

 

 

He kept being visited by an apparition.

There never will be a last time with her; he always will be finding a younger version of her somewhere, somewhen. One day he will laugh and hurt by the side of an alive, vibrant River. And then nothing. He will not even know it, not before his death when he looks back and realises the last time he saw River was just a random adventure, which he spoilt by yelling at her. She will just slip away mid-sentence for him. He will never hear the end of her story. How unfair.

 

 

He gave up on people because he thought he could not mistake stones for her.

Not even.

 

 

“Are you haunting me, River? Are you preventing me from killing her again? Are you jealous? You are the one who told me not to travel alone. I cannot think when you are around.” He argued with stones and mildew.

In his cell, he laid papers and equations and snippets to understand her, the woman twice dead, while he battled her away, the woman never dead. He flew before the TARDIS’ understanding.

He didn’t need it.

She was constantly pressuring him for new companions and adventures, landing everywhere she found distracting enough.

He slammed the door, leaving.

 

 

Then a brunette had his heart and brain, and full attention.

But his guts and skin remember River only.

He had been wearing this body for too long, and too long by her side.

Addicted to her. That's what he was, River deprived.

The flames in his cell could not keep him warm at night from the cold embrace she met him with. Every night.

Sleeping was necessary for his mind to process the information he stacked during the day about people splintered in time, ubiquity, genetic memory, transpersonal experiences.

But to sleep is to welcome back River’s mind against his. He knows the images passing before his eyes at day are nothing but remnants from her.

 

 

(When did he let her in so deep in himself?)

 

 

This palinopsia he can cure, this persistence of vision is a phenomenon he knows not to be real.

Dreams are River’s realm now. In dream, he cannot tell what is real. And the things he sees.

The Ponds together again, loving and hugging and alive.

And River, whose body is a wonderful thing, whose body is a miracle, whole again, after the Library, as if there could be an after Library.

He doesn’t want to be that man who clung to the memory of the departed. He prayed for her to go away.

 

 

A brother offered him to exorcise his demon.

 

 

The days he filled with Clara, burning and alive, even dead. The mystery, behind her amber eyes taunting him, was warming the room, keeping him on the edge. His spirits were higher than before when he lived recluse on a cloud. There is hope, there is life, and adventures and impertinence a little, and camaraderie, a lot, in those brown eyes of her. He cannot wait to find her.

“Let me find her, River.”

 

 

He tried to think it was only River getting out of his system, his body purging itself; that it was not guilt or fear over letting her go and forgetting.

Because River is the last of the Ponds as much as he is the Last of the Time Lords. And she died in a Library long ago. Amy probably knew that, as much as he tried to, he is no hero.

She never asked him to take care of her daughter.

 

 

(Yes, absinthe is green and sand is gold. How very appropriate of you, River.)

 

 

The other day, Brother Jorge remarked while cutting his hair.

‘You chose us for so many wrong reasons. I’m afraid there is lust in your heart.”

Only because he lost her.

“And gluttony.”

Oh quite, he thought. But he deserved to find her. The Universe would make a bargain.

 

 

Every time he heard her golden revenant treading upon the rotten earth leading to his refuge, he locked the door and pursued his other ghost, in himself, exploring worlds he had relegated long ago to the back of his mind, to seek her.

At least when River haunted his cell, she was not in his head.

He even drew her for fear to forget.

How strong the power of a Pond face against his will.

When it was not enough he ordered to be given colours and painted her portrait. The woman twice dead.

Maybe there is no plausible explanation; it was the Universe playing him. Punishing him for wasting so many lives.

(Who decided he was entitled to a friend?)

 

 

“She is not a thing, you know. A mystery remains a thing. A woman is not a mystery.”

Brother Samuel said it with a smile.

The Doctor shuddered.

(She _is_ a mystery.)

He kept trying to find evidence of the existence of the Clara Oswin Oswald.

 

 

There was a statue in the muddy corridor leading to his cell, which had a round face and big doe eyes. He saw a cockroach crawling out of its mouth.

He did not take it for the face of a saint.

 

 

“Stop it, I served my sentence in you. I want her.”

 

 

Once, he stood by the lectern, lost to Clara, as always. The prayers coming from the choir, loud and clear, like blood rushing through veins, dragged him out of his thoughts. The stained glass was casting a surreal light on the cold pavement. He felt this light was his sanctuary, his hope for a renewal.

He felt it was Clara.

The voices struck a high note and the moment shattered.

He felt he had recanted the Ponds. Desecrated River.

A few feet away a man was lying in tears, lips on the stone.

 

 

(It would be a sin.)

He did not leave his cell any more.

 

 

She gracefully swung there, sitting on the edge of his working bench, eyes green like absinthe, hair golden like sand; her outfit was a form-fitting emerald Earth cocktail dress from the 1950’s, cut mid-calf, her tiny feet were set in what seemed glass stilettos. The diminutive handbag matching the Vortex manipulator on her wrist.

With a tilt of her head, she smiled and asked where he was in his search.

Flabbergasted, he stared at her, expecting maybe a rush and a slap, an infuriated glare, not this cool patient presence by his side.

Far from pressing, or jealous.

“The TARDIS…”

“…told me, you’ve become a monk,” she sighed. “I was a little worried, I’m your wife. Don’t take any vow you don’t understand, Sweetie.”

“You say? You must admit the ceremony on Lakertya was not very easy to perform.”

“How was I supposed to know their ‘yes’ and ‘no’ could not be translated by the TARDIS? You didn’t know it.”

“You agreed to an awful lot of things for the honeymoon.”

She jumped to her feet in a rustle, her hips in full sway, obviously enjoying what she was witnessing on his face.

“You never complained about anything. Not the tiger. And certainly not the banana.”

She sat in his lap, gripping the lapels of his frock before frowning and fiddling with his hair. His hands fell to her side, comfortably finding her hips.

“Have you let them cut it, it’s ridiculous.” She closed the distance between them and whispered just before his nose, making him squint slightly. “You look like Little boy blue. How old are you, really?”

All he can see is her laughing lines, giving an alluring slant to the eyes, their fullness to the lips. When did he learn to appreciate folds on a face?

“Want to give me a big cuddle?” he asked in jest, half expecting the peck her mouth was so deliciously promising.

She miaowed back, eyes dangerously set on his lips.

“You know you will eventually find her or she will eventually find you.”

“Do you…” he started, eyes leaving the mouth for the eyes.

“Spoilers.” Her hands were furling his loose collar, fresh fingertips brushing the bare skin underneath. The rough fabric seemed so concrete beneath the fine cloth sliding off her shoulders. She settled her forehead against his and her wild curls tickled his face, her breath as she spoke hot and fruity. He welcomed her proximity, her familiarity.

He missed her, he confessed with relief.

Spoilers meant there was still some adventures ahead for them.

“And you will love her, Sweetie. Like you always do. It does not mean you will forget them.”

Her hand was rubbing his nape, playing with the hair, sometimes pulling and twisting, and harmless pain prickling his skin. He felt her warm and alive and his. As she always is.

Unlike him, she never had held back, even with the knowledge of her crimes hanging upon her.

“You will just grow bigger hearts to hold us all within.”

His hearts swelled at the thought, glorious thought, he could indeed hold them all at once. The Ponds. The Tylers. The Smiths. The Lethbridges. Their essence had somehow found a vessel in River and they were pouring their love onto him, through River’s touch, breath, gentle nudging. It was as if indeed they were all here, their hopes and characters bumping into each other, receiving with approval the others company. All fine, getting along riotously.

And there in the middle of the trust and love and sometimes annoyance he inspired, he sensed a new presence.

Clara.

He beamed.

“Thank you” he whispered and their foreheads broke apart. The proud gleam in her eyes was akin to his.

As a reward, he aimed for her luscious lips. She let him, backing away at the last moment and pulling the hood on his face.

“I’m sorry to intrude. The bells of St. John are ringing.”

For a moment, he stared at his lap, the only spot his hood permitted him to see, where River had rested a moment before, aghast, still feeling her warmth, her weight on him.

A wave of anger and loss roamed his hearts, cleaning the apathy, sending him on his feet.

He pulled back the hood and growled at the friar.

 

 

(What kind of demon are you, River?)


End file.
